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Folklore Graduate Group Thursday 6-8:40 Wms 305 Bennett Hall Mailbox Office Hours: by Appointment FOLK\ENGL\ENVS 575-640 ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINARIES Fall 2009 Mary Hufford [email protected] Folklore Graduate Group Thursday 6-8:40 Wms 305 Bennett Hall Mailbox Office hours: By appointment "Environmental imaginaries" names the contending discourses that order society around processes of development and change. Public controversies over development are often staged as struggles between collectively-wrought worlds, or “imaginaries,” that relate us in particular ways to our surroundings. Throughout the 20th century, European phenomenologists and American pragmatists tackled the infamous Cartesian dualisms upholding the separation of nature from society and art from industry. By the end of that century the phenomenological idea of the “social imaginary” had gained currency among social theorists as a way to understand the relationship between the world as lived and experienced and the world as “objectively” recoverable through scientific methods. In the 1990s geographers Michael Watts and Richard Peet coined the term “environmental imaginaries” to focus attention on human relationships to the “natural” world as an overlooked dimension of modern social imaginaries. The study of environmental imaginaries opens onto a “third space” along the divide between the humanities and social and natural sciences. Traversing that divide, we will explore how it is that Mikhail Bakhtin’s ecological poetics and John Dewey’s aesthetic ecologies can productively complicate and dismantle the Cartesian legacy of institutionally entrenched dualisms. We will be asking how these dualisms are reproduced, enacted, and materialized in such diverse sites as Appalachian strip mines, Sea World, nature centers, Universities, environmental policy, and public hearings on development proposals. We will examine critically the reproduction of narratives that subjugate alternative environmental imaginaries along lines of class, race, and gender. What are the possibilities for changing these narratives and where are those possibilities realized? How are alternative ways of knowing and being sustained through naming practices, narratives, and other speech genres, as well as yardscapes, protest rallies, spontaneous shrines and other forms of public celebration and display? Weaving together theories and case studies with your own experiences, observations, and written reflections, this seminar will familiarize you with the poetics and politics of modern environmental imaginaries. At stake is nothing less than place, identity, and the nature of human being. 1 Course Texts: David Abram. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. Tony Bennett, et al. 2005. New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Mary Hufford. 1992. Chaseworld: Foxhunting and Storytelling in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. Charles Taylor. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. These books have been ordered through Penn Book Center, near Samson and 34th Streets. All other readings will be downloadable from the course blackboard site. Films and hard copies of the readings will be on reserve in the Rosengarten reading room. Work for the Course: 1) Participation: Do all of the required readings and post short written responses and exercises, as assigned, to the blackboard discussion page. Written exercises will take the form of responses to prompts I will post in advance. Participate actively in class discussion. 2) Gleanings from everyday life: Over the course of the semester, bring in six “exhibits” encountered in your everyday life. Be prepared to relate your exhibit to something raised in the readings. The “exhibit” can be a newspaper clipping, an artifact or a photograph of an artifact, a story you heard, an event you witnessed. Be prepared to connect your exhibit to class discussion. 3) Term Project: – Explore a modern environmental imaginary, through a study of one genre of production. This genre could be public art, cinema, a novel, a landscape element, a contested space such as the Barnes Gallery, a spontaneous public display, or the imaginary of an organization such as Spiral Q, Scribe Video, Philadelphia Mural Arts, or narrative in such modern spaces as nature centers and community planning meetings, architecture, landscapes and so forth. You will need at least three events or “texts” demonstrating both variation and consistency across productions. Using analytical tools and concepts from the course readings, describe the imaginary that is conjured. Guidelines for the proposal (due October 19) and the paper will be posted to the course blackboard by October 1. Please see me by Friday, October 12 to discuss your topic. Submit both hard and electronic versions. The electronic version should be either a word document attached to an e-mail, or, if multi-media are used and the file is larger than 10 megabytes, you may submit it on a cd or dvd to my mailbox in Bennett Hall. 2 Schedule of Topics and Readings 1) September 10: Introduction Overview of questions, issues, resources and work for this seminar. 2) September 17: Ecologics, Politics, and Poetics Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, pp. 1-48. Abram, “The Ecology of Magic,” The Spell of the Sensuous, pp. 3-29. Hyde, “Some Food We Could Not Eat,” The Gift, pp. 3-24. Clark and Holquist, “Discourse in Life and Art,” Mikhail Bakhtin, pp. 197-211. Bell, “Deep Fecology: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Call of Nature,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, pp. 65-84. View Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I (on reserve) Further reading: Uexkull, “Introduction to Umwelt,”Semiotica 134:107-110. Watts and Peet, “Liberation Ecologies and Environmental Imaginaries,” Liberation Ecologies, 260-269. 3) September 24 : Organic and Mechanistic Cosmologies in Conflict Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, pp. 49-100. Merchant, “Farm, Fen, and Forest: European Ecology in Transition,” “The World an Organism,” and “The Mechanical Order,” The Death of Nature, pp. 42-68, 99- 126, 192-215. Hyde, “The Labour of Gratitude,” The Gift, pp. 40-55. Davis, “The City and the Park,” Spectacular Nature, pp. 40-76. View Saltmen of Tibet (on reserve) Further reading: Cantwell, “Enclosures, Gardens, and the Festival Market: The Ogre in the Tale.” Ethnomimesis pp. 32-48. 4) October 1: Discourse\Locality\Identity Hufford, “Introduction,” “The World of the Chase,” and “Ritual Moorings,” in Chaseworld, pp. 1-78 3 Thomas, “Natural History and Vulgar Errors,” in Man and the Natural World, pp. 51-91. Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” Modernity at Large, pp. 178-204. Further reading: Schutz, "Transcendences and Multiple Realities," in On Phenomenology and Social Relations, pp. 245-262. 5) October 8: Critical Regionalism Taylor, Betsy, “Public Folklore, Nation-Building, and Regional Others.” Indian Folklore Research Journal. 1 (2): 1-27. Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.” In The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Foster. Shuman, “Dismantling Local Culture,” Western Folklore, pp. Hufford, from Chaseworld, “Inscribing the Stage and Its Players,” “Making the Dogs,” and “Inscribing the Fox,” pp. 79-144. Further reading: Herr, Cheryl, “Introduction.” Critical Regionalism and Cultural Studies. Pp. 1-26. Hufford, “’One Reason God Made Trees:’ The Form and Ecology of the Barnegat Bay Sneakbox,” In Sense of Place: American Regional Cultures, eds. Allen and Schlereth, pp. 40-57. Jones, “Regionalization: A Rhetorical Strategy.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 13:105-120. Tzonis and Lefaivre. “Critical Regionalism.” In Critical Regionalism, ed. Amourgis, pp. 3-23. 6) October 15: Time’s Body and Public Space Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries. Read pp. 83 – end, with particular attention to Taylor’s discussion of time, temporality, and secularity in the modern social imaginary. Holloway and Kneal, “Mikhail Bakhtin: Dialogics of Space.” In Thinking Space, ed. Crang and Thrift, pp. 71-88. Arendt. “The Public and the Private Realm,” in The Human Condition pp. 50-67. O’Neill, “Time’s Body: Vico on the Love of Language and Institution,” in Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity, eds. Tagliacozzo and Verene, pp. 333-340. 4 Further reading: S. Stewart, “The Gigantic,” On Longing, pp. 70-103. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 84-258. Fraser, “The Extended Umwelt Principle: Umwelt and the Nature of Time,” Semiotica 134: 263-273. October 22: NO CLASS ***Please schedule an appointment with me by Tuesday of this week, October 20, regarding your ideas for a term project.*** Submit draft project proposals electronically by Friday, October 23. ARTICULATIONS 7) October 29: Collective Embodiment and Spatialized Hierarchies Douglas, “The Two Bodies,” in Natural Symbols, pp. 69-87. Gilbert, “Resurrecting the Body: Has Postmodernism had any Effect on Biology?” Science in Context, 8:563-578. Hufford, “Carnival Time in the Kingdom of Coal,” Social Identities (in press). Poovey, “Making a Social Body,” in Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830-1864. Further reading: Salamon, “’The Place Where Life Hides Away: Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, and the Location of Bodily Being,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 27:96- 112. Noyes, “Façade performance in Catalonia,” Southern Folklore 52:97-120. 8) November 5: Regional Discursive Formations: Appalachia Bauman, “Folklore,” in Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments, pp. 29-40. Allen Batteau – “A Poetic for Appalachia,” In The Invention of Appalachia, pp. 1 – 18. K. Stewart, “Nostalgia: A Polemic,” Cultural Anthropology
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